Organize a Campaign with SmartSuite's Project Management Features (Beginner SmartSuite Tutorial)

In this video, I'm going to explain how you can manage a marketing campaign in SmartSuite. I'm talking about things like organizing your general creative brief, your major milestones, your marketing tasks, and even the content and resources you need to keep your campaign organized. All inside of SmartSuite in just this short video. If you'd like to follow along as we go through today, please do use the affiliate link in the description below so you can click with us because this is going to cover a lot. And if you have any questions as we dig in, go ahead and leave a comment below. Thanks so much to SmartSuite for sponsoring this video. And with that, let's Once you're inside the home area of SmartSuite, what you're going to want to do is go to add a new solution. Start with Template the template we're going to be looking for today is called Marketing Campaign. If you search Marketing campaign up in the top left, you should find it. Show up over here and just click Use Template to load it into your account. Once it loads, you should see something like this pop into your SmartSuite account. And here we have our pre made structure to start organizing our marketing campaign. Now the first thing I like to do when we have any kind of campaign or project of any kind is to write out some kind of project brief, an overview to help us organize the what, the why, the how of the big picture of this project. Now SmartSuite does have a Smart Docs feature that allows us to write long form text, but because it's inside a record itself, it's actually perfectly suited for us to use these campaign name areas here as our jumping off point. So what we're going to do is create a new record for the name of our first campaign and we're just going to call this practice Campaign one. Inside here we we are going to use the campaign details area, particularly these blocks right here to write out the scope of our campaign. Each of these fields are long form text areas and we can tell that by going into the Action menu, Modify field settings and seeing this is a text area. Now, because I'm a little bit of a geek and you might be as well, what I'm going to suggest we do to get started here is actually change these into Smart Doc fields. This is like SmartSuite's full featured document editor and I like to swap things over because I like the extra formatting and style that you can add into a Smart Doc. So here you can see we've converted this from a long text to a smart doc. And now if we go into this area, not only can we type words, we can also use slash commands to add additional details like linked records, attachments, divider lines, dates, and a whole lot of more formatting. So I'm going to repeat this for any other fields that I'd like to really expand on my thoughts. So rather than just promotions being long text, I like to have extra style. It's just me. So I'm going to swap this over to a smart doc as well. Now from here we want to actually start writing out what is our purpose and goal for this campaign. So to fill in this purpose and goals area, I would look to any existing templates you have for how you scope out a project. If you already use a creative brief, perhaps that would be good to paste in here. But rather than pasting in directly in this field here, pro tip for you, I want you to paste it in to the default field field settings. So if we go into modify field settings, head over to defaults, we can actually fill in our own template here so that all new campaigns created default to having this structure in it. So in this case I've added my fill in the blank areas. I'm going to delete any one time data. I'll just leave some blanks here to fill this in later. And if I save this as a default value, every new campaign will have this structure in it. That's where I want you to put your creative brief in if it exists. And if you don't have one, just watch as we create some more here. You can steal mine. Now that we've filled in our default values for purpose and goals, we might want to do the same for any of these other fields. For example, if your campaigns are always assigned to your one project manager, maybe head in and set up a default value. So that's always going to be assigned to say, the person creating the campaign. Now the next step we want to do to start planning out our own campaigns in here is to get rid of the demo stuff here. Because as we can look through, we, we've got a list of campaigns, people and Personas we're targeting in each campaign, the content we need for each campaign, brand, assets, channels, all this good database stuff. But these aren't our channels. So what we want to do is go up to the overall solution level and delete the demo data from the account because we need to add our own in order to really make this whole thing work for our own business. So go ahead and click delete data delete that demo data and you'll watch all of the default information be wiped out of the account. And. And the only stuff that will remain are the things that you have added. The next thing we want to do to get our campaigns ready to go is to start defining the stuff we need to have happen in order for the campaign to be happening. Right now we just have databases of all this information, but somewhere we probably want to start tracking the activities we need to do to get a particular campaign ready. So if we open up this record, this one that we had created together, probably practice campaign number one. What we're going to want to do is add some of the project management features that SmartSuite offers. So we're going to go over here, add a new field, and we're going to choose either sub items or checklists. I'll show you what each of those are here. So you can choose whichever you prefer. Sub items look something like this upon setup. They allow you to add particular fields and custom fields, much like a parent record could. So if we go over here, we could add that every sub thing maybe has two date fields. We could add that, click Save and add these in. If we add these sub items into our campaign, they break out like this and allow us to add essentially subtasks of a kind for this project. So we could say map out email sequence, add some description here, add additional fields if we feel we need them, and go ahead and add that in. And it looks something like this. This is our first option for how to break out the parts of our project you utilize subitems and if you like this subitems approach, one field I would suggest you add in these field settings will be to add some kind of status field by going in here, clicking the little plus and looking for a status option. Once we have this in here, we can choose our preferred settings and go ahead and click Save. That way we have a status to break out each of these action items we need to track. So in this one, perhaps we want to say this is in process, update that, and there we go. Save. Subitems are a great option if you need to have custom fields or standard fields for your particular sub things, your sub activities, this would be great. For example, if we wanted to track each individual deliverable or landing page or whatever, and we didn't want to have them in their own separate record, we could do that with subitems. But personally, for simple tasks, I still find checklists a little bit easier to use just because I like the satisfaction of that clear checkbox and they're just a little simpler to set up. So so for this checklist I'm going to choose my preferred color, set my options, and go ahead and add that field. Similar to subitems, this allows me to break out additional details, but in here we have a preset assigned to and due date field and I don't necessarily need to add additional custom fields, which if I don't need custom fields, that's not really a huge problem. Similar to the Smart Docs above, if you are going to have checklist items, I would suggest going into those field settings and setting up some defaults of the tasks you normally do in a campaign so you can have them all mapped out for next time. So you could have draft emails, proof emails, I don't know, know whatever your steps are landing pages, create all of these default list items here so that way the checklist for new records will always have those pieces in them. At this stage, the next step we really need to do in order to start working on our campaign in SmartSuite is to add these pieces in, add the sub items or add the checklists. Whatever pieces you need, define your project plan based on your knowledge of what you need to do. Add each of those pieces in, then unpause this video so we can move on. For me, I've decided to use both subitems and checklists. I've used subitems here to break out major milestones, so I've got Confirm campaign days, create assets, and a confidence tracker for how good I feel about those major milestones. I created that by modifying my field settings here, adding a few custom fields, and I've decided to hide some of the fields that didn't really matter too much to me for this confidence factor. I could choose to add things like filters and so on here, but this feels pretty good for me. Below that I broke out marketing tasks as different checklist items because again I just like the checklist, it's personal preference and I could assign and date each of these out to the respective people and even have this baked into the default values for the future. Once we have this set up, I would want to scroll down in my practice campaign and locate the channels and content area. These are linked record fields that are linking information of the overall campaign out to some of these other areas we have created into our accounts, such as the brand assets we have, the buyer Personas we have, and so on. If we haven't already, now would be the time that I would suggest starting to track your channels that you're publishing on the resources you use and so on inside of SmartSuite. Because right now these are blank. But I can easily create a record right from this window to create something over in the brand assets area for each brand asset that I'm going to use in this campaign, such as maybe our brand guide, although that's kind of a cheating one. I could fill in more info if I want, but I'm going to keep it simple. Maybe I could also have a design content such as landing page number 3198, whatever we want to call that. We could define some more information about what exactly that looks like. And I could add what channels I'm going to involve in this campaign as well, such as our email or maybe YouTube or whatever else we want to have as a channel. Each of these fields I'm creating from here are actually being added over in these separate databases. So if I go over to channels, we'll see the email one has just been added. I could add more information here if I wanted to, but but for now, this is giving me a starting point to start organizing my campaigns. Ooh, and another little pro tip here. Do you notice that these fields over here are grouping by the campaign that's related to it? That's right. If you have related fields, meaning things linked together, you're not just linking them, you can also group by them, sort by them, and so on. If that is important to you. If you'd rather see more information about the campaign, these linked record fields are super powerful and allow you to change how they're for example, maybe I want to see when exactly this campaign is in the preview without having to click on it. I can change the display format of this linked record to show me the summary of the project right here. Now, the last thing I want to do after I fill in all this information, because there's a lot to add here and that adds tons of value, is I want to make sure my team knows about this particular campaign. To me, the easiest way to go about that would be actually go up into the comments area that's built into SmartSuite and Start Start a new discussion here. I can tag whatever my team member is, whether that's Layla or everyone on my account or each particular team that I've defined inside SmartSuite's team settings and I could share them. Hey, here's the new campaign and so on. I could share any information I'd like to do about this project and click Send. And we know that posting that comment is going to show up inside people's notification centers, such as some of the notifications you see here inside my notifications from past events. I'm not getting notified because I'm the one who wrote it, but you get the look. It'll work for each person individually. In addition to this comment, it might be helpful for me to make sure that my assigned people are purposely assigned and if I wanted to have additional assignee fields to break out the different roles inside this project, such as one person who is in charge of project management and the other person in charge of proofing, I could go ahead and define those extra assigned to roles right here. Like perhaps I want to filter this to only show certain teams and I want to allow that person to be the proofer on this overall project. I'm going to link it to the same status field. That way it shows up in their My Work section. I'm going to rename this original field to be the Project Manager so that the roles are really well defined. That way, when my team members come in here with this comment, they go look at the campaign. I'm tagging them in. They can see exactly what they're responsible for in each given project. In this case, I'm in charge of both, but you can define each of these out and realize you can have as many assigned to fields as you'd like and have them linked to either the same status of the overall record or or have different status fields for each person all inside one record. The choice is up to you. Now, if I want to go a little bit over the top here, I could also go ahead and set up an automation that says every Monday for all active campaigns, send an email with a status report to my team. Or maybe I even want to go a step further and create some kind of dashboard where my whole team can rally around and see the countdown to when the campaigns are starting, how close we are to our financial goals, or so on. But I think for a basic campaign plan, this structure itself is going to be more than enough for most of us. We're going to track our tasks and objectives and data all inside this campaign summary. We'll link out to additional resources we need to create or reference as needed, and we'll make sure our team stays up to date and all collaborating in the same place by using the comments and activity tracking available up inside the very top right corner of each SmartSuite record. That's how you can organize and create a marketing campaign inside of SmartSuite, using as many or as little features as you might like. I think we could go so much deeper into this video if we wanted to. So if you guys would be interested in a part two of this video, going through some more advanced applications of this marketing campaign structure, go ahead and just write part two in the comments below so we know whether or not to follow up this video with a deeper dive. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.